Double the Flame
by llethe
Summary: Batman has to be more than a monster. Begins, gen


Summary: Batman has to be more than a monster.

Category: Gen  
Rating: PG-13  
Characters: Alfred, Bruce

Warnings: Spoilers for all of BB and at least one heavy allusion to TDK.

Author's Note: Written for "the love triangle" theme at **batfic(underscore)contest** at Livejournal.

**Double the Flame  
by llethe**

01. Scalene: _"When I found you in that jail, you were lost. But I believed in you._

Once, Alfred made the decision to burn down a forest to remove the sin. That decision was made in quite a different time, in somewhat different circumstances. Years after, Alfred resigned himself to a position – a far-reaching position but a position nonetheless – and two words to encompass an acquiescence so everlasting.

"Very well."

For an eight-year-old, what else could he have done?

Alfred resigned himself to believing that, one day, Bruce would pull himself out of the memory of his parents' deaths. Rather, Bruce only found inflexible anger out of muted sadness; year by year, the eight-year-old grew older (as they tend to do), and he realized new convictions. His thousand-yard stare became harder, his mind sharper but further from reach, until…

The night after Bruce disappeared, Rachel stood at the door of the Manor and clutched the loose ends of her coat tight around her chest. That night, he learned that the day before Bruce didn't come home, Rachel had known more than Alfred had ever suspected.

"He had a gun, Alfred. He was going to kill that man. I… I just… _Bruce_. _Bruce_ would have done that. And I…"

Every piece of his experience said that Alfred Pennyworth had very little to do with the choices of a twenty-three-year-old man, much less one who had stood still in Crime Alley for fourteen years. Of course, Alfred could still only blame himself; for ten years, for longer than either Thomas or Martha, he had raised Bruce.

The fault rested with his fourteen-year acquiescence: the many times he'd said "very well," hoping for but never quite expecting Bruce to stand for himself instead of his parents. There were times, very few and far in-between, when Bruce pushed hard enough to bend the boundary between butler and guardian. Those times meant nothing. Bruce had been his responsibility to appease, and, quite obviously, Alfred failed that duty.

For seven weeks, Alfred believed he would never again have the chance to try.

The investigation into Bruce's disappearance was long, tedious, and nothing more than lip service. Falcone was the last to see Bruce alive; so, of course, the first place to investigate was the river rock bed. Always the first place, that river: an unchanging facet of Gotham's worst trait.

Though Bruce had been away at colleges for three years, the Manor was not the same in Bruce's absence. Before, the Manor had stood for and been kept for something. For seven weeks, the Manor was the mausoleum of which Bruce had spoken. It was terrifying.

Then the postcard arrived: no signature, only "Why do we fall?" written in Bruce's nearly illegible scrawl. Alfred never doubted its authenticity; he only hoped that Bruce would finally learn how to pick himself up again and absolve his restless anger.

That anger was not absolved. It transformed into a powerful stimulus, but it was still anger all the same.

02. Isosceles: _I took away your fear_

Alfred wants to ask, "What have you done to yourself, Master Wayne?" Though he raised the boy from age eight, took him through his teenage years and into adulthood, it's not a question that he will ask.

After all, he's not quite certain that he wants to fathom what is held inside those seven years. And he is absolutely certain that he doesn't want to ask how he, Alfred himself, can justify helping Bruce become the Batman.

Though he lives with him – _it_ – the Batman is just as much a mystery to him as it is to the people of Gotham. He hardly knows what the Batman is and barely knows the man who called, after seven years of silence.

What he knows and sees is Bruce's obsession with Batman. His life has fallen into step with the rhythms of the night; beyond Batman, beyond the mentality Bruce carries when alone in the Manor, the rest of him exists to deflect suspicion. "I can't chance having to go out as Batman _drunk_, Alfred," he will say, as he learns new ways to fool his peers with a glass of champagne. When Alfred offered that Bruce play the part of a billionaire, he hadn't quite intended for that part to become an additional personality.

Alfred has more and more come to be unable to see the difference between Bruce and the city's vigilante. He doesn't see the boy he raised in his parents' stead, nor does he see the young man taken with a cynical rage. He fears that Bruce has burned the proverbial forest, demolished himself, and rose from the wreckage as the offender Gotham believes him to be.

The relaxed amity that has settled over Bruce is all that Alfred hoped for, before. After the postcard arrived and Alfred presumed that Bruce had finally come to apprehend his own damage, it's all that he expected.

Only now, Bruce drives over police cars and intentionally causes others to wreck. He shoots missiles at car parks and drives atop the roofs of buildings. Bruce says that the Batman is removed from thrill-seeking and vengeance, that the Batman will shake Gotham from apathy, but all Alfred sees is Bruce rejecting the law, under the delusion that he should.

Seven years is long enough to lose sight of a person. Bruce's anger masquerades as resolve, as something tempered into everlasting good. Bruce calls it "just a symbol"; Alfred calls it a monster.

It's a monster that will shame them both in the eyes of those who once mattered the most. Worse, the night will come when Bruce doesn't survive _it_; Alfred doesn't want to bear the accountability of sacrificing their son for a monster.

Bruce would say that Alfred simply doesn't understand, would assume that Alfred isn't even trying. Quite so, perhaps, and it doesn't very well matter. Alfred once made the decision to burn a forest to remove the sin. He won't do it again.

03. Equilateral: _and I showed you a path."_

"I didn't save Gotham, Alfred," Bruce said quietly. Dried blood flaked from his fingers: a mess made in the moments before Alfred could examine the abdomen wound himself.

These stitches were nothing more than shoddy field tricks he'd learned in the military; they would heal just as jagged and rough as the thread must have felt going in.

It wasn't the first time they'd forgone a hospital in favor of keeping pretense; this time, at least, the affliction hadn't resulted from an dreadful night on the street. From all that Alfred had gathered, Batman had barely figured into this injury one bit.

"I couldn't have done it, Alfred. You were right. This… Batman has to be more."

It's enough to warrant a reassessment of Batman, of what Bruce has dedicated himself to do for Gotham. (Though dedication is just a nicer way of saying "obsession," still.) It's the answer to the question, one he will never ask, of what Bruce Wayne is to Batman.

Quite clearly, Bruce Wayne is the same as Batman. That flesh wound had been aimed at Bruce, not at Batman, and that, quite clearly, makes all the difference. If some insanity is there, it's an insanity that is needed to survive this city as something more than a bystander or a criminal.

Bruce took his damned time coming up for air; twenty-two years, in fact. When he breathed again, Alfred chose to help him _not_ because Bruce said Batman wasn't about thrills – but because Bruce said Batman wasn't about _him_. Believing that had been the trouble.

Alfred has yet to understand what Bruce did throughout his missing seven years, though those seven missing years aren't missing at all. They are a lifetime burned and a lifetime rebuilt. For those seven years, he prepares breakfast and hardly sleeps at all.

It wasn't until Ra's al Ghul – the closest Alfred has come to knowing of what remade Bruce – burned the Manor to the ground and tried to put the rest of the city right there with it that the damage seemed to be finally cauterized. Almost all of the ruin can be rebuilt; the rest – the heirlooms and the memories – is unnecessary baggage for a man with no respect for limits.

Somewhere that night, Alfred saw Bruce without Batman, carrying a strength, not an insanity, which Bruce never previously possessed. He had fought for the city and let someone else save it. That's something better than a monster.

The mask comes, and the mask goes. Kevlar armor is traded for Armani suits and back again. Every night, Bruce's adrenaline vanishes within moments of his head hitting anything soft. The scars accumulate, excuses become harder to lie. There are limits, Alfred wants to say, that Bruce doesn't respect. But as long as Alfred can see the human in those disregarded confines, Batman can be worth something to more than Gotham.

It's enough to enrich the lower foundation of the southeast wing.

-end

llethe / August 25, 2008


End file.
